


Disco Demon

by StarlightSystem



Series: Transcendence AU [13]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence (Gravity Falls), Feels, Gen, Girly Icelandic Pop Sensation BABBA
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-11
Updated: 2019-06-11
Packaged: 2020-04-24 09:57:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19170958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarlightSystem/pseuds/StarlightSystem
Summary: Alcor the Dreambender, weathered by hundreds of years of loneliness, was in one of his so-called “dark periods” wherein his humanity takes a back seat to his identity as one of the most vicious demons out there. Thus, he’s at a loss for words when that facade gets cracked by a girl named Cassie, and an old BABBA song.





	Disco Demon

**Author's Note:**

> This fic takes place in the [Transcendence AU](https://transcendence-au.tumblr.com/)! Here's my take on a Cassie origin story -- she shows up here a little later in the timeline than usual, but hey, that's the fun of a shared universe with a loose canon.

_He saw the flames rising through the floor,_  
_flesh burned away and reformed before his eyes again and again,_  
_laughter, so much laughter, but yet he felt nothing,_  
_felt the chains clap around the mortal’s neck and the screaming,_  
_the screaming was so good, so delicious, but ultimately so,_  
_...unsatisfying._

 

Alcor retreated into the Mindscape, and collapsed with a groan. He rubbed his ears, which were still scalding from the last summoning, when an angry man threw holy water at him just because he decided to interpret "I offer to you any of the fine beasts in this house" as an invitation to eat the man's dog. It wasn't his fault that he knew everything and that he gained the most sustenance from offerings that caused anguish. Some people just had no respect for the wheeling and dealing of a mythical demon.

He took off his signature top hat and ran a clawed hand through the fluffy brown hair underneath. He wasn't quite sure why he felt so exhausted, given that he was a being of pure energy with no weaknesses. After all, the summons hadn't been a complete waste -- for the man's insolence, Alcor decided to curse him and four generations of his offspring to perpetual bad luck, and the demon delighted at the thought of the rich chaos that would come of it. Additionally, even though the holy water continued to sting and ache, it wouldn't cause a lick of lasting damage.

It didn't even occur to him that maybe he was just emotionally worn out. Emotions were, he thought, the most mundane and malleable of thought abstractions, and the Dreambender was surely above that tripe. It frequently staggered him to realize just how much humans were willing to offer for the sake of nebulous emotions like love and nostalgia. Fulfilling demands like "the undying love of women around the world", for instance, was so ridiculously easy (especially when they don't specify _how many_ women), that he'd sometimes actually feel a little guilty about taking useful things like "two years of your life" and "every childhood memory of drinking soda" as payment. But, after all, he was a demon, and improperly balanced deals _were_ his bread and butter.

All he wanted to do now was rest. There was a movie marathon of human suffering on all day (every day, in fact), and that always cheered him up. Later, he could go tend to the Flock -- his Nightmares were finicky creatures, but ultimately soothing to be around. There was no reason to throw the whole night away just because of one bad summons.

However, no sooner had he conjured up a floating sofa and television than he felt another summons come in. Growling, he mentally scanned the caller to see what was being offered to him. He rolled his eyes at the sight of a juicy rare steak (sure, it's nice, but it doesn't beat a freshly slaughtered animal), but then paused when a familiar sensation wafted through his awareness. The feeling wasn't of malice, or of greed, but of sheer desperation. A grin full of shark teeth spread across his face. Desperation was like candy to him -- the more desperate a human was, the more they were willing to give up.

"Alright," he mumbled to himself. "One more summons tonight. I'll trick them out of their life's savings and then get back here to try to salvage some kind of relaxing evening."

Alcor tossed his hat into the air, and it flew in a perfect arc to land a few inches above his head. He felt the summons come through again, poorly pronounced incantations tapping softly on the shields around his mind, and reached out to grab it. His fingers plucked through the air, searching out the circle that had been drawn for him (summoning circles were, to him, merely a suggestion, but people seemed to prefer when he used them). Finding it, he pictured the circle before him, became one with the particles of air floating above it, and wrenched them from their homes to be replaced with him. All this took place in less than a second, with the result of Alcor blipping into corporeality, and then trying to muster the motivation to make some sort of entrance.

"Wh̹o ̗̱̣͉͍̯̝d̶a̱͖̺̦r͚͙͚͉̭̀es̛̬ͅ ̼͈̩̖̮s̲̳̙̝̘͘ṵ͇̖m̸͇͇m̮̦o̻͔̺n ͞A̰̥̤̞̮̦ͅl̪̼̠͍c̟o̸̤̖̫̩͉͕͖r͉̟̳̺̮̞̗͟ ̫͚͖͍̙̗t̮͇̬̖h̩̞͠e̯̞ ̭́D͘r̭̲͚e̸̜̪͓̱̯̰̟a͕̩̮̰̟̘̜m̪̝̹̼̠b͉͔e͈͝n̵ḓ̤̯͙̝̹e̫̘r҉?̜͕̠̪" he roared, spreading his wings and baring his teeth. Two potted plants next to him went up in flames. Eh, it was something.

The wicked grin died fast on his face, though, when he took a look around. After that last summons, he was expecting another basement crudely converted into a dungeon, and an angry adult with bloodshot eyes demanding global domination. To his surprise, he saw a young girl, no more than 20 years old, standing before him. She was shaking visibly, aura positively pulsating with terror, hands curling and uncurling nervously around a book of spells. The summoning incantation died on her lips and whatever words came next seemed to be choking her. Finally, she managed to croak "Please don't yell, you'll wake everyone up."

Perplexed, Alcor looked around again, saw the cheap wooden bunk bed, the boy band posters on the walls, the desk covered in lined paper, and realized that he was standing in a dorm room. The girl wiped the bangs out of her eyes and Alcor could see the desperation shining through them clear as night. An evil grin crept onto his face. This was perfect -- human neophytes were notoriously bad at defending themselves from demonic legalese, and pulling an insidious fast one was just what he needed tonight. He opened his mouth to speak, about to launch into his smoothest, most trustworthy voice, when it suddenly registered with him that there was music playing. His jaw dropped.

_That girl is you..._

The girl appeared to realize it at the same time, as the blood drained from her face and she finally wrenched her eyes away from the demon floating in front of her. She dove over to a laptop sitting on the desk and started frantically hitting buttons on it.

"I'm sorry!" she squeaked, her face turning the color of a boiled rabbit. The laptop finally got the hint and stopped playing the song. "I- I'm so frazzled, this whole thing is so stressful, all the websites I looked at said completely different things about how to summon you so I had no idea if this was actually going to work, and I had to make sure my roommate was busy tonight but I’m so scared she could come back at any minute, and- and then I was listening to music and forgot to shut it off, and this is so embarrassing, and-"

"Wait," Alcor said softly, dropping to stand on the floor. "Is that 'Disco Girl'?"

It was the girl's turn to look flabbergasted. "You know ancient Icelandic pop sensation 'BABBA'?" she marveled. "Oh wait, you know everything, I- I forgot about that, well duh though I mean that's why I summoned you in the first place, and- and-"

"No," Alcor breathed. "That's not why." Despite himself, a couple of golden tears rolled out of his eyes.

He remembered.

He stepped out of the summoning circle, and the girl, clearly having expected him to be bound to the circle's confines, gasped in panic and fell backwards onto a pile of unsorted laundry. Alcor ignored this, and walked to the computer. He hit play, shut his eyes, and started bobbing his head.

 _Disco girl_  
_Coming through_  
_That girl is you_  
_Ooh oooh ooh_  
_Ooh oooh ooh_

Her confusion beginning to override fear, the girl stood up and stared at the mesmerized demon in front of her. This wasn't at all what she was expecting when she summoned the Devourer of Souls into her dorm room. "What's, uh," she started, "what's… going on right now?"

"I used to love this song," he said finally. "How do you have this? BABBA is centuries old."

"I, uh, found it in the Wayback Machine," the girl replied. "I just really like old music. My friends all think I'm weird, but what do they know? Disco Girl is an absolute classic," she added, hoping it would help curry the demon's favor.

Alcor smiled, and for the first time in a while, thought back to that day in 2012 when he met the Multibear. "My friends used to think I was weird for listening to this, too," he said. "They said that bo- I mean, demons, shouldn't like 'girly' top 40 hits."

The girl actually chuckled. "That's silly," she said. "Top 40 songs are in the top 40 for a reason: they're catchy! Although admittedly it's kind of hard to understand a lot of the words because it's such an old dialect of English..."

Alcor stared at her as she trailed off self-consciously, and felt something odd welling up inside of him. It punched the insides of his stomach, tickled his throat, battled for dominance in his imaginary brain until he couldn't stand it for even another moment, felt himself suffocating under its weight, and then... and then he laughed. He laughed so hard that he had to bend over, laughed so long that he could feel tears caressing his eyes. It wasn't a demonic cackle, it was the genuine laughter of a long-dead twelve year old boy who liked to sing in the shower and play board games with his sister and… and who never got the chance to go to college. He looked up, and saw that his summoner was smiling at him, and that a lot of the fear in her aura had vanished.

"What's your name?" he asked her.

"It's, uh, Cassie," she replied. "Are you really Alcor the Dreambender? I thought you would be, uh, scarier."

Alcor teasingly stuck out a forked tongue. "Hey, I'm scary!" he retorted, and punctuated his claim with a hiss. That didn't have quite the effect he'd intended, as Cassie went white as a sheet and jumped about two feet into the air, landing awkwardly with a thud on an overflowing backpack. He felt an odd twinge of guilt as she picked herself up, guilt at the small beginnings of a bruise he could see on her right knee, guilt at the sudden reappearance of fear in the girl's aura.

Backpedaling, he folded his wings up behind his back, in an attempt to seem less threatening. "Well, I guess I've got a friendly streak, too, but don't tell anyone," he said, choosing his words carefully. “Wouldn't want the other demons knowing that I like pop music."

Cassie didn't respond to that. Alcor took the hint, and conjured up a chair (the one at the desk was stacked with textbooks) so he could just sit and continue to listen to Disco Girl. Cassie sidestepped around the summoning circle on the ground, and sat on her bed. Alcor saw the fear starting to drain from her aura again, and noticed the edges of her mouth begin to curl up into a smile. When the song ended, he cleared his throat and stood back up.

"So," he started, recalling that he was, in fact, still at a summons. "Why _did_ you summon me?"

The smile dropped off of Cassie’s face, and she started fidgeting nervously. "Well, uh," she quavered, "I know this is selfish, but…”

Alcor’s smile shrank a little, and he rolled his eyes. Here it comes...

“I need help with math.”

What.

“No matter what I do, I can't get the numbers and formulas to make sense in my head,” she continued, licks of shame creeping into her voice. “I'm already on academic probation and I could get kicked out of school if this keeps going."

Alcor looked around the room again. He saw more piles of paper gathered at the foot of the bed and poking out of the closet, piles of paper that he noticed were covered in red ink and little detached drops of self-loathing. He looked back at the girl, saw her aura, saw that in the absence of terror it was dominated by the blues of exhaustion and purples of stress. He saw in her the desire for knowledge that was still at its core self-centered, but which reminded him of another girl that needed help with math homework a long, long time ago; a girl he helped without deals or circles, and repaid him instead with nicknames and sweaters.

Cassie started tearing up, and tried to hide it by looking down at her feet. "I'm so scared, I didn't know what to do. My future depends on this. One of my friends said something like 'you should learn how to summon demons so you can ask Alcor the Dreambender to do your math homework for you', and I'm pretty sure she was joking but also it sounded like a pretty good idea, not that I want you to actually do my homework for me because that's cheating but I'd REALLY REALLY like it if you could see whatever's wrong with my brain that makes this so hard, and-"

Alcor cut her off. "Okay, seriously? I'm gonna ignore for a minute how _foolish_ it was to summon a _demon_ to help you with your math homework -- actually, I'm not! You could've gotten yourself killed, or worse! Y̸̼̺̠̱o̞̯ṷ̦̮͜ ̧͕̖͎c̴̣̞̟̮̙̻a͎͙̪̣̜͟n̼͔̤̱̪̻̥͠'̟ͅț̲ ̱t̗̞̤̱͡r̝̯͚u͏̬̤̪͚͍͓s̠t͚̲̘̻̠͕ ͏̼̘u̡̱̳̲͎̜͚s҉͙, ͓̥̠̥̠w̤̬e̤̹̕ͅ'r̝͖̪̩̣͙e͏ m͍͈̞̙̹on̛s͔̮͎̯̘͕t̗̯̱͓̭̥͡ers!"

Cassie paused, and looked up at her guest. "Well," she replied, "you don't seem very much like a monster to me."

Oh.

Dipper's eyes widened and he quickly turned away. Something heavy had stormed right through his shields and was pounding against his essence with enough force to choke the imaginary breath straight from his body. He tried to fight it, queried his limitless knowledge for a distraction, and found his mind cloudy and distracted… a monster… he was a monster… **_YOU’RE NOT A MONSTER_**. This wasn’t happening, this definitely was _not_ happening right now. Dipper knew lots of things, and one of those things was surely that Alcor the Dreambender, the Twin Star, the Reality Warper, and so on, was definitely not standing in a college dorm room crying his eyes out because a _human_ was being nice to him.

He felt Cassie walk up and wrap an arm comfortingly around his shoulder, and in that moment, he didn’t feel like a monster, he felt like a boy who’d lost everything and spent lifetimes denying it. He felt like a scared human who had had such a hard time coping with the infinite tragedy hoisted upon him that he’d burrowed into a facade of cruelty well enough to fool even himself. The memories came rushing back and he was suddenly sure that this had happened before, had happened several times, and he didn’t need true prophecy to know that it would happen countless times more.

The cascade of shimmering tears slowed. The demon sniffed and wiped a cufflink across his puffy eyes. He blinked, and remembered his vicious thoughts from just before he was summoned by this girl. Who was he trying to fool? He turned back to look at her, saw the fear-tinged concern permeating her aura, and realized that the fool in the room was him. The urge to scam Cassie had long drained away, and what was left was an alien feeling of warmth.

"Okay," he said finally, trying and failing to hide the wobble in his voice. "I'm going to offer you a deal."

Cassie gulped. This was it, this was the big moment that she had spent an _entire hour_ preparing for. If she wasn't careful, this could go really badly. Although, if she was being honest with herself, there was absolutely no way she could have prepared for this. She hadn’t even thought demons _could_ cry.

Dipper shook his head. "This isn't an ordinary deal," he said. Cassie frowned, confused, and stepped back to sit on the bed. Dipper leaned forward in his chair, balancing his elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand. "I'm offering to tutor you in math. You can call on me whenever you need to, and we'll make this make sense to you. I can see how your brain works, and I know which study methods will help you and which won't."

Cassie gasped and shot back up off the bed. "Oh my stars, really?" she yelped, seemingly forgetting her earlier concern about waking up her neighbors. "Thank you thank you thank you thank you!!!!"

"Hold on, hold on!" Dipper broke in. Cassie closed her mouth, but didn't stop making noise or vibrating. "I'm offering you this, BUT, you have to promise to _never again do something this stupid_."

Cassie stopped jumping around, and stared at him. "Wait, really?" she asked. "That's all?"

"Well," Dipper replied, face twisting into a friendly smirk. "There's one more thing you have to do for me."

Cassie gulped, and sat back down. "Ok," she said nervously. "What is it?"

Dipper's smirk grew into a grin, exposing a row of serrated teeth. "Whenever you call on me for a tutoring session…" he replied, extending a clawed hand bathed in blue flame, "I want to listen to Disco Girl."

A brilliant smile exploded onto Cassie face, and without a moment of hesitation, she jumped up and shook the demon's hand. "Deal!" she squealed.

The flame around Dipper's hand extended to cover Cassie's as well, and then vanished with a _fwoosh_. The elating, nourishing rush he usually felt in these moments was surprisingly meager, like he’d tried to eat a mango and all he got was the pit. A tiny part of him cried out in rage at the unfair bargain which for once was tipped in the human’s favor. Dipper shushed that part of him. He wouldn’t be able to deny it forever but... Not now. Later.

"Great!" Dipper said, taking his hat off and pulling a textbook out of it. "We should get started. I know you've got a lot of books here, but they're all terrible, so we're gonna use this one instead. Hit play on that BABBA CD and let's get down to business."

Cassie smiled. "What's a CD?"

Dipper laughed again. "Oh, wow, it really has been hundreds of years, hasn't it." He stared into the distance, sporting a fond, if mysterious, smile. His eyes were still wet with tears, but he didn’t feel like crying anymore. Instead, he felt… hopeful.

"And to think," he murmured to himself as Disco Girl started playing again, "that if you hadn't been listening to this song when you summoned me, I probably would've eaten your soul."

Cassie froze. "What was that?" she asked, nervously.

The demon stuck his tongue out at her again. "Nothing!" he crooned, jumping up and corralling the confused college student into a chair. "Time for math!"

**Author's Note:**

> I woke up one morning with Disco Girl inexplicably stuck in my head, and immediately wondered how Alcor would react to hearing it hundreds of years later. As it turns out, he reacts pretty well. :)


End file.
